When director Jason Reitman and casting director John Papsidera put together the large ensemble cast for “Saturday Night,” Reitman’s film about the first-ever episode of the legendary sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live,” they ran into one spot of trouble. “Dan Aykroyd was almost impossible,” Reitman told Entertainment Weekly of the casting process.
But when Dylan O’Brien auditioned, the part just clicked into place. “That was a big moment,” the filmmaker said, noting that O’Brien was the last of seven actors cast to play the Not Ready for Primetime Players from that first season of “Saturday Night Live.”
O’Brien didn’t know any of this at the time. As far as he was concerned, “Saturday Night” seemed like a project he wouldn’t book anyway, and so the “Teen Wolf” and “The Maze Runner” actor didn’t even bother to send in an audition tape months before he was eventually hired.
“I thought I was so wrong for it,” O’Brien tells Gold Derby. “So it has been an interesting lesson for me to not take myself out of any race for a role because I deem myself not fit for it.”
Plus, as O’Brien found out, he and Aykroyd – at least the character as written by Reitman and Gil Kenan – shared many similarities.
“I learned things that I didn’t necessarily know about myself, or see in myself,” he says. “I have similar qualities that this guy had. And I sort of unearthed them and found them just by way of this process. I just got to say, ‘F–k it,’ and throw myself into it. Because I got the part. So I wasn’t gonna say no, and I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to trust this, and I’m gonna try.’”
Set in the 90 minutes before the first-ever “Saturday Night Live” broadcast on October 11, 1975, and told in ostensible real-time, “Saturday Night” chronicles how creator Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) and a cast of rising comic talents like Aykroyd, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and John Belushi (Matt Wood) managed to put “Saturday Night Live” on the air for the first time and in the process changed television forever.
Of all the characters depicted onscreen, it’s Aykroyd who is perhaps closest with Reitman in real life. The filmmaker is the son of the late Ivan Reitman, and Aykroyd knew Jason from when he was a young boy. Like his father, Reitman also directed Aykroyd as Ray Stanz in the Ghostbusters franchise.
That real bond between Aykroyd and Reitman informed O’Brien’s performance, the actor says. “Dan has this relaxed social nature, and Jason very much sees that in me,” O’Brien says. “He would comment on that a lot. And I’m not sure that I’m a very relaxed, social person. I wouldn’t describe me as that, but I’m sure Dan wouldn’t describe himself that way either.”
He continues, “I picked up something about Dan that I really tried to focus on as well and that I really loved about him: this sort of insatiable curiosity that he just has for life. He’s just a very interested person. Take the origin of ‘Ghostbusters.’ That entire thing came from his fascination with extraterrestrial phenomena and possibilities and theories and things like that. So he had this exterior that does not totally match his interior.”
O’Brien researched Aykroyd – and practiced his dialect relentlessly to approximate the comic’s voice, which O’Brien does to great success. But the best thing he did in terms of preparation was just watch early episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and, in particular, Aykroyd’s screen test.
“I became obsessed with the screen test, because it’s really seven straight minutes of him improvising, and he’s just unbelievable,” O’Brien says. “He never even flubs his words. He’s so precise and he’s so fast, and he cycles through five or six characters that he created. He’s just making it up on the fly and it is so seamless that you almost take it for granted. It seems scripted and prepared because he’s just so lightning quick and creative and imaginative.”
Despite Aykroyd’s friendship with Reitman, O’Brien has never met the man he plays in “Saturday Night.” But Aykroyd has shared praise for the film, calling it a “stand-alone masterpiece.”
“He’s been very supportive about the movie, which is great,” O’Brien says. “I don’t think he would have publicly put his stamp on it if he didn’t genuinely feel that way. So I totally, I think the expression is really authentic and it’s nice to get that from one of the original cast members.”
“Saturday Night” was part of a big year for O’Brien. In January, his film “Ponyboi” debuted to acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival (it will arrive in theaters in 2025). In October, in addition to “Saturday Night,” O’Brien starred in the Max film “Caddo Lake,” a thriller that has performed well on the streaming platform. Then, of course, he also had the New York Mets to worry about. O’Brien is a big fan of the National League team and once even threw out the first pitch before a Mets home game at CitiField. As the Mets made a deep run into the playoffs – losing in the National League Championship Series to the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, O’Brien says he had to find a balance between work and fandom.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can never have a movie come out in October again,’” O’Brien says. “Luckily, there was only one game during the National League Division Series [when the Mets beat the Philadelphia Phillies] that I missed because of a prior commitment. We had a Q&A that night or something. And I was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m not at this game.’ For other fan bases, if you’re a Yankees or Dodgers fan, you know you’re going to be in it every year. But for us Mets fans, it’s obviously a special moment when it’s happening.”
“And then I realized how much of an insane person I must sound like to most people who I’m dealing with for work,” he jokes. “I tell them I have to go to the game, this doesn’t happen every day. I don’t think that they’re going to understand I need to go to a Mets game.”
